The news from the Windsor Hotel has been trickling out slowly. The good news is that there was agreement between the Jubilants and the opposition that Commissioners of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission must go.

The bad news is the manner in which the Parliamentary Joint Select Committee seems to have determined they’ll go.

By September, it says. After having been paid off for the duration of their tenure. This is arguably unconstitutional given that the Commissioners, collectively, are all in violation of Chapter Six on integrity.

Why? Let’s start with the corruption of which the IEBC Commissioners (and those who also sat on its predecessor) have been accused. The “Chickengate” scandal alone involves the leaking of rival bids to Smith and Ouzman, inflated printing costs paid to Smith and Ouzman to enable bribes and kickbacks to Commissioners and staff as well as entertainment costs. The IEBC chair benefited from the last.

The evidence relating to Chickengate is in the public domain, courtesy of British court proceedings on the same. Then there was the procurement of voter registration and voter identification equipment in 2013 — none of which spoke to each other, defeating the purpose of their purchase and wasting all that money.

Then the procurement of results transmission equipment that also (surprise!) failed. The evidence relating to these shenanigans is also in the public domain. Yet, for all these individual and collective failings, the JSC has decided the Commissioners will go home with all the pay expected for the full length of their tenure? That they’ll do so with full impunity?

The JSC has lost the plot. As constitutional lawyer Wachira Maina has pointed out, first, security of tenure exits to protect the good from interference, not the bad from removal. Second, the option of removal is twofold. Not just through the elaborate constitutional and legal safeguards put in place to protect good Commissioners.

More bad news has to do with the decision on “cleaning up” the voters register. It is hard to understand what an auditing firm can do to address the real issues with the register: The multiple voters registers (with multiple figures for the total number of voters).

The total absence of a credible explanation for the patterns of additions and deletions in 2013 that effectively favoured Jubilant strongholds and disadvantaged opposition strongholds. The fact that voter registration has continued since, if underwhelmingly.

The last bit of bad news is that the JSC doesn’t seem to have applied itself sufficiently to the problem of securing the integrity of the vote from polling stations to constituency tallying centres to the national tallying centre.

We want to know that votes cast are the votes that are counted. That the count doesn’t miraculously alter itself as it moves from polling stations to the constituency and then national tallying centres. The issue isn’t how the move is made (whether manual or not). It’s the safeguards along the way.

All in all, it’s good the Jubilants and the opposition decided to talk. But in the talks, it looks like the most important things slipped through the cracks.

L. Muthoni Wanyeki is Amnesty International’s regional director for East Africa, the Horn and the Great Lakes.